The time for universal health insurance coverage has come. Everybody
seems to know that -- except for the Republicans, all too many of whom
cling to traditional denunciations of universal coverage as socialism.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has been holding talks with Republican lawmakers over the past week, and all signs point to opposition from the GOP.

But
for the welfare of the country and their political party, Republicans
should, instead, seize the lesson of Nixon's trip to China. With one
brilliant foray, Nixon converted the massive threat posed by the
isolated China into an asset, secured a favorable mention in history,
and stripped the Democrats of a key issue. By embracing their own brand
of universal health coverage, Republicans can do the same. There's a massive constituency behind the policy. Buffeted by the
recession and the threat of losing their employer-provided health
insurance, the American people want universal coverage. Much of the US
business community wants it too. CEOs rarely say "Know what I love
about my job? Buying health care." The chore is so unrewarding --
corporate buyers have failed to create effective cost or quality
improvements -- that many small business CEOs simply skip it. As a
result, millions distort the efficient allocation of labor in our
economy by opting for jobs in dying, big companies that offer health
insurance, rather than productive ones in small companies that do not.
Furthermore, our employer-based health insurance system forces American
businesses to pack our massive health care costs -- about 70 percent
greater as a share of GDP than other countries' -- into the cost of
their exports, a huge albatross in a globally competitive economy.

The Republicans can do a Nixon-goes-to-China by offering a better
version of universal coverage. There is, after all, substantial concern
about the Democrats' reliance on universal coverage through a
government-controlled system like Medicare. Some distrust government's
ability to make good on its promises. Medicare currently owes $36
trillion in services to those who paid for its use when they hit 65.
Have you seen a spare $36 trillion hanging around? (For perspective,
that amount is equivalent to about three years of US GDP.)

Another concern is that government will control costs by rationing
health care to the sick. The government-controlled UK health care
system, for example, has the lowest uptake of cancer drugs among the
five biggest European economies and correspondingly low cancer survival
rates. Concerns about rationing are not demagoguery. How else can a
government control costs? Many experts dismiss as wishful thinking the
Democrats' claims of achieving efficiency by implementing dazzling
information technology and other technocratic tools. And because the
truly sick constitute only 20 percent of health-care users, but account
for 80 percent of health-care costs, they may as well wear a bull's eye
on their backs: they are a politically vulnerable target for cost
control through rationing.

Transforming the government into a monopolistic buyer of health care
will also affect the supply of doctors. All too many doctors, saddled
with massive educational debts, refuse to see Medicaid patients because
they are pay so little. But if government were the only payer, some
prospective physicians, facing the prospect of incomes totally
controlled by the government, would reluctantly enter other professions.

Finally, a government-controlled system would likely impair the
medically and economically important genomic sector. US venture
capitalists have provided billions for research that may provide cures
or even preventions for genetically linked diseases. Kiss that money --
and the important personalized medicine industry it could create --
goodbye under a system of government-controlled universal coverage.
Venture capitalists will find it too risky to invest in markets where
one payer controls prices.

The Republicans could instead offer a consumer-controlled universal
coverage system, like that in Switzerland, in which the people, not the
government, control how much they spend on health. There are no
government health insurance programs. Instead, the Swiss choose from
about 85 private heath insurers. Rather than being stuffed into the
degrading Medicaid program, the Swiss poor shop for health insurance
like everyone else, using funds transferred to them by the government.
The sick are not discriminated against either -- they pay the same
prices as everyone else in their demographic category. Like the US,
Switzerland is a confederation of states that, as in the US, oversee
the insurance system. Enforcement by the tax authorities has produced
99 percent enrollment.

This consumer-driven, universal coverage system provides excellent
health care for the sick, tops the world in consumer satisfaction, and
costs 40 percent less, as a percentage of GDP, than the system in the
US. The Swiss could spend even less by choosing cheaper, high
deductible health insurance policies, but they have opted against doing
so. Swiss consumers reward insurers that offer the best value for the
money. These competitive pressures cause Swiss insurers to spend only
about 5 percent on general and administrative expenses, as compared to
12-15 percent in the US. And unlike Medicare, the private Swiss firms
must function without incurring massive unfunded liabilities.
Competition has also pushed Swiss providers to be more efficient than
those in the US. Yet they remain well-compensated.

We can also learn from the mistakes made by the Swiss. For example,
they pay providers for fragmented care, rather than for integrated
treatments for diseases or disabilities. The Swiss sustain an
inefficient hospital sector, and they aren't transparent about the cost
and quality of providers.

Republicans could enact Swiss-style universal coverage by enabling
employees to cash out of their employer-sponsored health insurance.
(Although many view employer-sponsored health insurance as a" free"
benefit, it is money that would otherwise be paid as income.) The
substantial sums involved would command attention and gratitude: a 2006
cash out would have yielded $12,000 -- the average cost of
employer-sponsored health insurance -- thus raising the income of joint
filers who earn less than $73,000 (90 percent of all filers) by at
least 16 percent. Employees could remain in with an employer's plan or
use this new income to buy their own health insurance.

The Republican choice is clear. They can whine while the Democratic
Congress enacts a government-controlled system, or they can embrace a
Republican approach to Universal Coverage.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.